The mapped story format is an interesting way to make longer news stories more reader-friendly.

Devised by the Calgary Herald’s David Hedley—a friend and former colleague—the mapped story format begins with the summary written in a classic inverted pyramid style.

The body of the story is organized into mini chapters, dealing with one news element at a time. The mini-chapters are led by informative subheads, signaling to readers what comes next.

Hedley suggests the mapped story format offers several advantages over the commonly used inverted pyramid, including improved clarity, scannability and comprehensibility.

While this guideline focuses on news, the principles apply to any field of writing. In fact, it works very well on the Web, where well-versed designers frequently utilize anchors, links, subheads and digestible chunks of layered web copy to promote positive online experiences.